Google DeepMind announced yesterday that the program « AlphaGo » managed to defeat the European Champion at the game of Go.

Demis Hassabis, the Google engineer who makes the announce starts by saying that « games are a kind of microcosmos of the outside world », which tends to make us believe that only computational progress would be needed to go from mastering the microcosmos to mastering the outside world – there would be no qualitative difference, only a difference of scale.

He follows on saying that « another way of viewing the complexity of Go is the number of possible configurations of the board is more than the number of atoms in the universe ».

Indeed, the problem seems linked with the number of atoms in the universe. With a game of Go, we take only the board into account, and we leave aside what happens around. With a « game of the outside world », we would need to take everything into account.

That make us wonder (as Kurzweil does): what if we could take the universe as a game of Go, what if we had the computing power to take into account all the atoms of the universe and assess all their resulting combinations?

Quentin Meillassoux, in his conference Temps et surgissement ex nihilo (in French) discusses the possibility of calculating probabilities at the scale of the universe.

Comparing the set of possible universes a suite of transfinite numbers (according to the definition of Cantor), he infers that the set of possible universes is not a countable totality – which makes impossible any calculation of probability on it:

« Racter strings together words according to « syntax directives », and the illusion of coherence is increased by repeated re-use of text variables. This gives the appearance that Racter can actually have a conversation with the user that makes some sense, unlike Eliza, which just spits back what you type at it. Of course, such a program has not been written to perfection yet, but Racter comes somewhat close.

Since some of the syntactical mistakes that Racter tends to make cannot be avoided, the decision was made to market the game in a humorous vein, which the marketing department at Mindscape dubbed « tongue-in-chip software » and « artificial insanity ». Not a true « AI » by any stretch of the word, but a unique program that is well worth a look as an indication of where the field of artificial intelligence was heading in 1984.

According to the Racter FAQ, co-designer William Chamberlain even released a book called « The Policeman’s Beard is Half Constructed » (Warner Books, NY. 0-446-38051-2, paper $9.95) before the release of the program, the authorship of which he attributed solely to Racter. »